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Wednesday, October 22, 2008

6.022 × 1023

I was teaching Pre-Algebra Wednesday morning and the section was over scientific notation. One of the problems in the book was to write out Avogadro's constant in long hand (NA = 602,214,100,000,000,000,000,000 in case you wanted the answer) which reminded me it was about time to celebrate Mole Day! See, there's a lot of benefits from volunteering, I totally would have missed Mole Day this year if I hadn't been hanging out with Ms. Price's class. (Katie gets to celebrate Mole Day every year since it's also her birthday, Happy Golden Birthday Katie!)

6.022 × 1023 is the number of atoms in 12 grams of Carbon-12. It's really just a useful number for writing chemical equations and figuring out how many grams of each molecule you need when you're doing chemistry experiments.

So here are two videos I found for Ms. Price's class (yep, all 15 of you) to give you a little introduction to moles. When you get into chemistry you'll get to spend a lot more time working with Avogadro's number (and calculating and expressing numbers in scientific notation!).





Happy Mole Day!

(and if anyone knows of better mole songs, let me know.)

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1 Comments:

Anonymous ronski said...

Thanks for the bday wish!

Yes, it did feel cold this morning (Erik's thermometer said 8deg F to give ourselves a little more credit). I had to remind myself of the list of rules:) I wont be caught under dressed tomorrow either!

October 24, 2008 8:17 PM  

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